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Curriculum Vitae

The basics

A Ruby developer living in England, I'm currently kicking ass at Ruby-based web development with a focus on HTML5/CSS/JS front-end code.

I've been building commercial websites for clients for the last 5 years, and have used Ruby/Rails for half of that time. I have excellent skills in Ruby, Rails, HTML, and JavaScript (both raw and with jQuery), along with several months apprenticing under a resident web designer.

I've spoken at several conferences including Euruko 2010 (notes, video) and do my best to attend as many conferences as possible.

Outside of work I spend my time learning my craft and researching other disciplines, such as architecture, psychology, and economics. I like to keep active; I'm a PADI qualified scuba diver and regularly teach climbing to newcomers.

Employment history

References are available on request.

Forward Internet Group

Front-end Developer - December 2011 to current

Forward Internet Group is an umbrella company which owns several internet properties including uSwitch where I am employed as a front-end developer within the Advice & Innovation team.

Our job is to build and support uSwitch's various personal finance products, while also creating innovative tools and processes for the rest of the company.

I work closely within a multi-disciplinary team of developers, designers, finance, commercial, and PPC specialists.

Some examples of my work include:

  • the Money landing page, which integrates data from various other uSwitch apps such as credit cards.
  • the TV landing page.
  • the image service I created for dynamic resizing and caching of images hosted on S3, with special effects such as wet-floor reflections. This saves designer effort, improves maintainability, and decreases page load times through improved concurrency.

Reevoo

Developer & Maker of Things - June 2010 to December 2011

During this time I was a Ruby developer at Reevoo, which is a company which collects, aggregates, and displays consumer reviews.

Part of the in-house team of 6 developers, I worked on all aspects of several codebases with a specialisation in front-end work.

At Reevoo I had the opportunity to develop an understanding of real-world scalability (with one of the apps serving 40 million impressions a month via websites such as Sony, Best Buy and Tesco), and to truly get to grips with JavaScript as a language, not just a means to a front-end.

Some examples of my front-end work include:

My back-end work is less visible, but includes the refactor of large chunks of JavaScript client code, Google AdWords API interfaces, and other significant chunks of infrastructure.

Eden Development (offline at time of writing)

Developer - April 2009 to June 2010

Before its closure, Eden Development was an agile web development agency which specialised in Ruby on Rails. I spent my 14 months at this company working on Rails (and other Ruby) applications for clients.

Eden followed agile practices, so I am comfortable with pair programming, BDD (with Cucumber), TDD (with RSpec), XP-style commit-based iterations as well as the more sequential form of agile of lean/kanban.

Among the various projects I worked on for clients I was on the core teams for Quiet Riots and an internal social creativity application for the BBC.

While initially focusing on back-end Ruby work, I quickly moved to working on both back-end and front-end development under the tutorship of our designer.

I left Eden with a thorough knowledge of Ruby and the ability to work well in, and occasionally lead, a diverse development team.

O'Neill Modern Media

Technical Manager - June 2006 to October 2008

O'Neill Modern Media is design agency which specialises in print, web, and LED advertising. I was the Technical Manager for OMM for two and a half years, which comprised all sorts of work from building client websites in ASP.NET, to managing the IT needs of the 50-strong company, and overseeing the installation and running of animated pitch-side advertising boards at 9 Premiership football clubs, including Manchester United.

It was during this time that I developed my client communication skills as I dealt directly with the heads of IT and marketing at the various football stadiums. I also developed my ability to deal with responsibility and pressure, which were available in equally large amounts.

Education

University of Westminster

BSc, Artificial Intelligence (2:1 hons) - 2003 to 2006

Bacup & Rawtenstall Grammar School 6th Form College

A2 Computing (B), A2 Geography (B), A2 Chemistry (D), AS Art & Design (D) - 2001 to 2003

Bacup & Rawtenstall Grammar School

9 GCSEs at A* to C grades - 1996 to 2001